Ayodhya: 25 Years Laterhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/taxonomy/term/25964/feed
enA Vandalised Civilisationhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/ayodhya-25-years-later/a-vandalised-civilisation
<p>VS NAIPAUL WAS among the earliest to pronounce the widespread prevalence of Mughal-era structures throughout north India—many built on the ruins of earlier Hindu religious structures—as an indication of cultural vandalism in history. According to the writer, several of today’s celebrated examples of Mughal and Islamic architecture were a standing monument to wounds inflicted on Hindu Civilisation by Muslim conquerors. They were sym- bols of oppression, reminders of both the aggressive spread of Islamic rule in the region and the submissiveness of Hindu subjects. These medieval monuments, including the Taj Mahal, spoke to Naipaul of ‘personal plunder and a country with infinite capacity for being plundered’. Their presence still rankled, these signifiers of Hindu Civilisation’s failure to fight back and assert its identity.</p>
<p>This was the leitmotif that ran through Naipaul’s non-fiction works, from <em>An Area of Darkness</em> onwards. In this 1964 book, he wrote that the remains of historic Hindu religious structures in North India spoke of ‘waste and failure’ among the majority, with Islamic aggression still taunting Hindu gentility for it on the architectural landscape of modern India.</p>
<p>In April this year, Narendra Modi became India’s first Prime Minister in decades to take a visiting dignitary to a Hindu temple, when Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull came to Delhi. Keen to share insights of Hindu religion and philosophy, Modi accompanied his Australian counterpart to the Akshardham Temple in the capital. In the shadow of the grand structure—for which land was allotted on the eastern bank of the Yamuna by the Government during former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s tenure—Turnbull stood impressed with the style, sweep and architecture of the Swaminarayan temple.</p>
<p>Until the early 1970s, it was the Lakshmi Narayan Mandir— popularly known as Birla Mandir, built by the industrialist family in the 1930s and inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi—that used to be on the official itinerary of every foreign dignitary on a visit to Delhi. However, by the late 70s, temple visits had become a no-no in the routines of international diplomacy, and attention shifted to monuments of the Turko-Afghan or Mughal period.</p>
<p>India’s capital today is home to not a single ancient or historical structure of Hindu religious origin. The visitor circuit in the capital’s proximity thus includes the Taj Mahal in Agra (and often the Mughal fort there as well) and the Tomb of Sheikh Salim Chishti and Buland Darwaza (built by Akbar in 1576 CE to commemorate his victory over Gujarat) in Fatehpur Sikri, apart from the Qutub Minar, Red Fort, Humayun’s Tomb and sometimes the <em>dargah</em> of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia in Delhi. The Lakshmi Narayan temple and the Akshardham Mandir built in the 21st are the only introduction to the glorious history and splendid architecture of Hindu religious heritage in the capital. The defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan on the plains of what is now Haryana in 1192 CE by Mohammad Ghori began six centuries of Delhi’s domination by rulers who were Muslim and under whom no ancient Hindu religious monument was erected. On the available evidence, the capital area is believed to have had 15 settlements over two millennia between 3000 BCE and the 17th Century CE. According to oral tradition and legend, current-day Delhi was also the likely location of Indraprastha, capital of the Pandavas from the epic Mahabharata. Among the oldest inhabited cities in the world, Delhi has been built, destroyed and rebuilt by conquering hordes many times, and, although it is a mostly Hindu metropolis, little remains by way of pre-modern architecture to suggest so. Most of the small temple edifices on the sides of the capital’s roads are considered acts of illegal encroachment; and the boards proclaiming them as <em>prachin</em> (ancient) temples go back no further than a decade or so. That is a bitter irony in a city so ancient and repeatedly overlain that it is viewed by many as a city over a city over a city, with its essential Hindu cultural heritage all but wiped off.</p>
<p>The structures of worship that existed under the Tomara (736- 1160 CE) and Chauhan (1160-1206 CE) dynasties are believed to have been destroyed by subsequent invaders of Islamic persuasion. Today, the ruins of Lal Kot, capital of the last Hindu kingdom, lie hidden behind a commercial complex in Mehrauli. Built in 1052 CE by Anangpal, it was expanded and fortified in 1180 CE by Prithviraj Chauhan to defend his kingdom against invasion. At the time, the city was known as Qila Rai Pithora. Later, it would become the seat of the Mamluk (Slave) dynasty, whose buildings serve as the locality’s landmarks. The Qutub Minar, the 73-metre minaret that defined Delhi’s skyline for centuries after it was built some 800 years ago by that Turkic-Afghan dynasty’s Qutub- ud-din Aibak, stands next to the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque, constructed around the same time on the site of 36 Hindu and Jain temples in existence before that. That idols of worship were smashed by iconoclastic warriors, and magnificent sculptures disfigured for use as building material for the city’s first mosque can be seen in the pillars at this site.</p>
<p>The wanton acts of vandalism and desecration by conquering hordes in evidence across north India is reminescent of the 2001 demolition—under orders of the then Taliban chief Mullah Muhammad Omar—of the globally-renowned Buddha statues at Bamiyan valley in central Afghanistan, 230 km northwest of Kabul. The 35- and 53-metres tall statues were truly stunning accomplishments, carved into the side of a cliff in classic Gandhara style about a millennium-and-a-half ago. They were blasted apart by dynamite, attracting global condemnation and drawing the Taliban into the spotlight for their gross religious intolerance.</p>
<p>Similar acts by medieval invaders, however, have not been viewed by all historians through the same prism of bigotry aimed at humiliating the conquered. Instead, the argument over this aspect of history has got sidetracked to whether claims of the count of Hindu shrines demolished by Islamic rulers are backed by evidence or have been overblown. Some contend that victors destroying shrines to deities that had state patronage under the defeated regime was a practice in medieval times even among warring Hindu kingdoms.</p>
<p>Today, contentions that play down the violence of the region’s history do not convince more than a few intellectuals and others with leftist leanings. Historians of the British Raj, too, mostly viewed north India’s medieval past as an unending story of pillage by Muslim rulers of a Hindu country, though they presented their own colonial influence as having had a civilising effect. In a 1999 interview, Naipaul asserted that Christian regimes did not vandalise India and Hindu heritage the way Islamic rulers did over the centuries. Naipaul observes that to truly experience the greatness of Hindu architecture from history, one has to travel across south India. To him, the ruins of the south symbolise the ‘continuity and flow of Hindu India, ever shrinking’.</p>
<p>WHILE THE SULTANS of Delhi were wrecking Hindu heritage in the north, the splendid temples built by the Chola, Chalukya, Hoysala and other ruling dynasties in the south have survived to tell the story of a glorious Hindu past. In 1975, visiting the ruins of the ancient Hindu Empire of Vijayanagara on the banks of the Tungabhadra river in Karnataka, Naipaul called it ‘a great centre of Hindu civilisation’ and ‘one of the greatest cities’ of the world in its time. His distress over its end is almost palpable in his 1977 book <em>India: A Wounded Civilization</em>. Today, the monuments at Hampi, embracing the ruins of Vijayanagara, capital of the eponymous empire, are also home to remnants of Dravidian temples and palaces that won the admiration of travellers between the 14th and 16th centuries.</p>
<p>That empire’s fall came not long after the Second Battle of Panipat in the north, which was fought in 1556 and marked the start of Mughal Emperor Akbar’s reign. His forces defeated those of the Suri dynasty’s Muhammad Adil Shah led by General Samrat Hem Chandra Vikramaditya, better known as Hemu. The general was struck by an arrow in the eye, and his army panicked. By some records, Hemu was decapitated and his torso was carried to Agra as part of the war spoils. It was in 1565, almost a decade after Akbar’s victory, that the Vijayanagara Empire crumbled in the south under the onslaught of an alliance of Muslim-ruled principalities around it. The plunder, Naipaul observes, went on for anything between five months and a whole year. Hampi today houses the renowned Virupaksha Temple and other monuments, all of which are on Unesco’s World Heritage List of historical sites.</p>
<p>In this narrative, the ferocity with which Muslim rulers enforced their control over their territories of conquest in the north ensured that religious structures of the Tomar-Chauhan period were taken down. There were fierce struggles among Turkic- Afghan warlords looking to seize power and no sultan of Delhi could let his army get complacent, but even phases of relative political stability did not result in more tolerance on their part towards the belief systems of the area’s earlier inhabitants.</p>
<p>While Hindus were largely free to pursue their religion in the privacy of their homes, the rulers did not allow any significant structure of a religious nature emerge under their watch that was not Islamic. The Mughal era, especially after Akbar, saw some shifts of state policy in favour of diversity, but the extent of these need not be exaggerated. Although the induction of Hindu advisors, administrators and army officers—as also the inter-marriage of Mughal princes and Rajput princesses—helped create a Muslim-Hindu pact of sorts that pre-empted any concerted anti-Hindu campaign, various restrictions stayed in place on practices that did not meet the approval of rulers. In general, with the ruling elite comprised largely of Muslims, there was little patronage of Hindus.</p>
<p>Independence Day TV viewers are familiar with visuals of the Gauri Shankar Mandir’s white summit and Jain Temple’s red <em>shikhar</em> across the Mughal-built Qila Mubarak, renamed the Red Fort by the British. The temples, however, looked nothing like this when Akbar’s grandson Shah Jahan founded the city of Shahjahanabad, of which the fort is a part. The Jain Temple, as seen today, came up in the early 19th century, in 1809 to be precise. Until the death of Shah Jahan’s successor Aurangzeb, this temple was a tiny place revered by Jain residents of the Dharampura locality. By the early 19th century, the Mughal Empire was in precipitous decline and weaklings on its throne with grandiose titles had little other than memories to remind them of their great past.</p>
<p>The Gauri Shankar Temple, on the other hand, came up in 1761, when Marathas had taken over Delhi and posed a serious threat to British ascendancy. A Maratha general built this temple and it stands as testimony to Maratha presence in the city for a short while until their defeat in the Third Battle of Panipat. This was fought between Afghan forces under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Abdali and Maratha forces under the Peshwas, who had established control across north India but suffered a defeat in the absence of support from Jats, Sikhs, Rajputs and the kingdom of Awadh, among others. All of them had reportedly been treated badly by Peshwa rulers at the beginning of their reign and are said to have been too cut up to offer support against Abdali’s army. The parallel decline of the Mughal Empire and the Peshwa defeat in this battle, which was drawn out over two months, marked the beginning of European colonial rule in India. After Maratha forces were driven out of Delhi, Hindu temples failed to come up under the capital’s new colonial masters.</p>
<p>Post Independence, in our collective zeal to present a politically correct version of history, we have ensured that Delhi’s—and north India’s—Hindu heritage remains hostage to a mix of distortions and apathy. History should be based on facts, not revised for political projects or harnessed for the sake of a narrative deemed ‘appropriate’ for mass consumption.</p>
<p>In the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992 and its aftermath, Naipaul saw a resurgence of Hindu India, a resolve to rise above centuries of failure to fight back and assert itself, even signs of an energetic and compelling creativity.</p>
<p>If, after 70 years of independence and 25 years after the fall of that Mughal mosque, some citizens still cannot gain a broader perspective of that day’s events, they should perhaps question their view of history.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Vandalised1.jpg?itok=UL4WMPwu" /><div>BY: PR Ramesh</div><div>Node Id: 23701</div>Thu, 30 Nov 2017 18:42:08 +0000vijayopen23701 at http://www.openthemagazine.comThe Hindu Inflexionhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/ayodhya-25-years-later/the-hindu-inflexion
<p>EVEN THE PASSAGE of 25 years hasn’t succeeded in eroding my memory of that day. I even remember the time: 3.45 pm on December 6th, 1992, when the first dome of the contentious shrine crumbled in a cloud of red dust.</p>
<p>That was irrevocable confirmation that what was being witnessed since noon that day was not merely extensive damage to a Mughal shrine, but something far more momentous, perhaps even the total demolition of the Babri Masjid—a mosque that had functioned as a Rama temple since 1949.</p>
<p>The sequence of events leading up to it and the hasty organisation of a makeshift temple on the ‘<em>garba griha</em>’ has been narrated in detail enough elsewhere not to warrant repetition. There are memories of the Rama Shilan pujas that were being held in the run-up to the 1989 General Election, the tumultuous passage of LK Advani’s rath yatra, the drama that preceded a foiled <em>kar seva</em> (‘devotional service’) in October 1990, and the police firing that resulted in so many deaths, the crazy 1991 General Election campaign that was in effect a referendum on Rama and included the fiery sermons of Sadhvi Rithambara and, finally, the <em>kar seva</em> on December 6th whose outcome was both unexpected and historic.</p>
<p>I was fortunate to have a ringside view of the events of December 6th from the terrace of a bhavan on the perimeter of the shrine that also served as the dais for the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bharatiya Janata Party leadership assembled in Ayodhya.</p>
<p>No one quite knew how the day would shape up. On the evening of December 4th, I ran into journalist Nikhil Chakravartty, with a reputation for being one of the best informed people in the Capital, at the India International Centre. When I told him that I was proceeding to Ayodhya, he drew me aside and simply said: “The real action is in Delhi.”</p>
<p>It was a tip-off that couldn’t be dismissed lightly. For weeks there had been persistent rumours that the wily Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao had entered into a covert deal with the BJP that would allow for a symbolic <em>kar seva</em> in Ayodhya but no more. Indeed, when I met Chief Minister Kalyan Singh in Lucknow on December 5th, he more or less indicated to me that nothing dramatic was really expected in Ayodhya the next morning. The BJP had even organised a public meeting somewhere in Lucknow that evening with Atal Bihari Vajpayee as the star speaker. Vajpayee was characteristically eloquent and extremely witty when he described the large crowds in Ayodhya that left people with no room to move. His message was clear: don’t add to the human crush, just stay at home.</p>
<p>No sooner had Vajpayee concluded than the beacon-flashing motorcade of BJP President Murli Manohar Joshi drew up. But curiously, Joshi didn’t complement what Vajpayee had said. Instead, he launched into a spirited espousal of the Rama Janmabhoomi cause, including an appeal to turn up in Ayodhya in large numbers the next morning.</p>
<p>I was travelling with my old friend and journalist, and subsequently Rajya Sabha MP Chandan Mitra. Both of us ended the day a little confused. Which version of the next day should we treat as authentic? Would there be a mere symbolic <em>kar seva</em> that consisted of a few pujas and a symbolic cleaning of an area outside the contentious 2.77 acres? Conversely, would the BJP-VHP manage to control the anger of <em>kar sevaks </em>(devotees) from all over the country? There had been at least national mobilisations of <em>kar sevaks.</em> How long could the movement continue mobilising Rama <em>bhakts</em> without having anything tangible to show?</p>
<p>I think our unstated understanding was that December 6th would see a grand show of strength but nothing beyond that. After all, there was the assurance to the Supreme Court by both the Central and Uttar Pradesh governments that the <em>status quo</em> would not be disturbed by the <em>kar seva</em>.</p>
<p>It was keeping in mind an anticipated anti-climax that we set off from Lucknow at a leisurely pace, to reach a crowded Ayodhya around 10.30 am. It was fortuitous that Chandan parked his Gypsy at a point not terribly far from the improvised stage on the terrace of a single-storied structure. We negotiated our way through a big huddle of Adivasi <em>kar sevaks</em> from Madhya Pradesh, ignoring some of the rude taunts that were hurled when they discovered we were journalists. It was equally fortuitous that we met Deepak Chopra, Advani’s private secretary, who helped us enter building and climb onto the large stage where there was adequate seating space.</p>
<p>It was around noon that the first hint of trouble reached the leadership on the dais. It was reported that a small contingent of <em>kar sevaks</em> had broken ranks and were climbing onto the domes with crowbars and hammers. In hindsight, it has been suggested that the demolition was a grand conspiracy. However, at noon on December 6th when the first news of possible direct action by a section of <em>kar sevaks</em> was received by the BJP leaders present, there was genuine surprise. I recall seeing Advani walking off in a huff and an incensed Rajmata Vijaya Raje Scindia telling some of the VHP functionaries to yank people off the domes by their trousers. Indeed, there were numerous appeals on the public address system asking people to keep the peace and desist from doing their own thing. Someone asked Ashok Singhal, arguably the real head of the Rama Janmabhoomi movement, to go to the site—about 100 metres from the place where the leaders had assembled—and calm things down.</p>
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<p>My first indication that events were taking their own course came around 1.30 pm when I asked Pramod Mahajan to assess the likely extent of damage. The good thing about Pramod was his bluntness. “What damage?” he retorted, “There will be nothing left”</p>
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<p>I don’t remember what exactly transpired in the next two hours, except everyone getting into an almighty huddle. My first indication that events were taking their own course came around 1.30 pm when I asked Pramod Mahajan to assess the likely extent of damage. The good thing about Pramod was his bluntness. “What damage?” he retorted, “There will be nothing left.”</p>
<p>This was confirmed at 2.30 pm when we spotted a man, his forehead covered in dust and his face smeared in blood, running towards the podium. He was carrying something covered in a dirty cloth with him, and he was accompanied by a few others. He came up to where a glum-faced Advani was sitting and offered this small bundle to him. Advani recoiled in surprise. Wrapped in the dirty piece of cloth was the Ram Lalla <em>murti</em> that had mysteriously appeared in the <em>garba griha</em> in 1949 to formalise the restoration of control of a sacred site that was believed to have been appropriated by invaders—there is still some doubt whether the temple was demolished by Mir Baqi in 1528 or much later during the reign of Aurangzeb.</p>
<p>After that, it was really a wait for the inevitable. After the second dome fell, Sadhvi Rithambara took over. From the podium, she worked up the huge crowd, chanting “<em>Ek dhakka aur doh</em>, Babri Masjid <em>tod doh</em>.” It was both frightening and mesmerising at the same time. The spectacle of a teeming crowd swaying to her chant is a memory that will always remain with me.</p>
<p>At around 4.45 pm, to ecstatic shouting that must have been heard even in neighbouring Faizabad, the entire disputed shrine crumbled to dust. On the terrace, sullenness gave way to ecstatic celebration as leaders and activists hugged each other. Some of the women were in tears and KS Sudarshan, later to become RSS sarsanghchalak, drew me aside and said: “History doesn’t always happen; sometimes it is made to happen.” In the distance I could see black smoke billowing. “There will be riots,” Mahajan remarked, his countenance reflecting deep concern.</p>
<p>The only person who struck a different note was Advani, the leader who had been offered the Ram Lalla idol because he was seen to epitomise this historic movement. He didn’t come up on the terrace but sat alone in a dark room, with just a candle by way of light. He was distraught, not least because this was not the course he envisaged for the movement that had helped redefine the contours of Indian politics.</p>
<p>THERE WERE TWO distinct phases of the Ayodhya movement: pre-demolition and post-demolition.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I recall seeing LK Advani walking off in a huff and an incensed Vijaya Raje Scindia telling some of the VHP functionaries to yank people off the domes by their trousers</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The first phase lay in taking an important, but yet localised, dispute in Awadh that dated back to at least the 17th century and transforming it into a symbol of a larger battle to rekindle Hindu consciousness and even give it a political direction. This phase was marked by spirited attempts after 1989 to persuade Hindus that Ayodhya was more than just a battle to reclaim an important Hindu shrine that had been taken away from the community by invaders—both Mughal and British. It was presented as a symbol of incomplete independence and evidence of a spurious secularism that had ended up denying Hindus their rightful inheritance.</p>
<p>The first phase was marked by doughty secularist resistance and fierce Muslim opposition to the Rama Janmabhoomi movement. Historians were mobilised to contest the claim that the ruins of a grand temple lay under the foundations of the Babri Masjid. The entire intellectual galaxy of India, which was beholden to a Congress system that had nurtured and patronised them since 1947, was drawn into the public sphere to oppose the saffron interlopers. Denial of the proposed temple and strategies to maintain the <em>status quo</em> in perpetuity were evolved, not least as an electoral strategy. Vishwanath Pratap Singh, the man who became Prime Minister on the crest of a growing anger against corruption, even devised a crafty strategy to divide Hindus on the basis of caste, a move that was calculated to puncture any grandiose notions of Hindu solidarity.</p>
<p>The demolition of December 6th, 1992, resulted in widespread civil unrest in India. There were vicious riots in Mumbai, culminating in the serial blasts of March 1993 that could be said to have begun a new chapter of Muslim resistance. However, the Hindu revolution that the likes of Ashok Singhal believed would be triggered by the demolition proved far more elusive. The BJP was able to consolidate the gains it made after the 1991 General Election, but the all-round gang up of secular forces that followed the demolition saw Vajpayee’s first shy at national power truncated to a mere 13 days.</p>
<p>In the immediate aftermath of the demolition and the riots that followed in its wake, the BJP was indeed cast as a political pariah. But this proved remarkably short lived for a number of reasons.</p>
<p>First, Narasimha Rao calculated that the old Nehruvian order had run its course and that India needed to be governed by a new set of assumptions. The liberalisation of the economy that was begun with Manmohan Singh’s 1991 Budget was not triggered by the Ayodhya movement, but it was definitely also aimed at undercutting the BJP’s gains. It was felt that the shift of focus from identity politics to economic self-interest would redefine the contours of the mobilisation. In theory, this seemed a correct assumption, but the reality turned out to be very different. The Congress failed to internalise the larger message of economic liberalisation and saw it as providing greater opportunities for corruption. This, coupled with the chaos that followed under the two United Front governments between 1996 and 1998, plus the comforting leadership of Vajpayee allowed the BJP to break out of its isolation. To Hindu pride was added ethical politics and stability—a powerful combination that allowed the BJP to tie up with regional parties and govern India from 1998 to 2004.</p>
<p>Secondly, the mobilisation around Ayodhya resulted in the creation of a Hindu vote bank that could appeal to at least 25 per cent of the electorate, a large enough share for India’s regional parties to see benefits in an alliance with it. There was a psychological fallout as well. Prior to 1992, secularism in India was marked by a generous measure of asymmetry. As S Gopal, Nehru’s official biographer described it, ‘the problem of minorities was basically one for the majority community to handle. The test of success was not what the Hindus thought but how the Muslims and other communities felt.’ This secular ‘common sense’ also marked Manmohan Singh’s December 2006 speech to chief ministers that “minorities, particularly the Muslim minority… must have the first claim on resources.”</p>
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<p>After the second dome fell, Sadhvi Rithambara took over. From the podium, she worked up the crowd, chanting “Ek dhakka aur doh, Babri Masjid tod doh.” It was both frightening and mesmerising</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After 1992, it became increasingly difficult for ‘secular’ parties to persevere with such assumptions. Although the shifts were slow and halting, Ayodhya facilitated a recognition that specifically Hindu interests could no longer be brushed aside dismissively. Simultaneously, there was a parallel acknowledgement that pandering to narrow sectarian impulses such as the enactment of the Muslim Women’s Bill after the Shah Bano judgment would invariably generate a countervailing reaction.</p>
<p>Initially, fed by some rather contrived and somewhat wishful quasi-academic assessments of the Rama temple movement, there was a belief that the Mandal Commission recommendations had negated the influence of any Hindutva among Backward Castes. It was believed that the Rama temple agitation had, at best, consolidated the BJP’s support among the upper castes and the trading communities who were in any case inclined towards the party. In a curious article in <em>The Times of India</em>, for example, the Marxist- inclined academic-journalist Arvind Narain Das detected a method behind the choice of Rama as the icon. A Kshatriya, he argued, was deliberately preferred over other possible choices: the Krishna Janamstan in Mathura and the Gyanvapi Masjid, built after the destruction of the old Kashi Vishwanath Temple in Varanasi. Lord Krishna was a Yadav and Lord Shiva’s origins were tribal.</p>
<p>THIS THEORY GOT a hard knock during the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election of 1991 that was held simultaneously with that year’s General Election. All the data suggested that the BJP owed its victory considerably to a very large chunk of OBC support. Anecdotal evidence suggested that a vast measure of rural support also came from women who may have been driven by religiosity. Other anecdotal evidence suggested that various Adivasi communities in Madhya Pradesh and South Bihar (now Jharkhand) also swung to the BJP as a result of the Rama temple movement. Overall, the agitation helped the BJP gain a wider social foothold, although it would be some time before a larger geographical spread was achieved. In states such as Gujarat and Rajasthan, the BJP also edged out other non-Congress parties to emerge as the principal challenger to the Congress.</p>
<p>Finally, the opposition to the Rama temple had often rested on some dodgy assertions by Left historians, many of whom teamed up with the Babri Masjid Action Committee to play ‘experts’. The intellectual hold of these historians who steadfastly denied there was ever a temple on the site of the Babri Masjid was quite profound, and they got huge play in the English-language media. Bodies such as the Indian History Congress were also brought to bear in attempts to rubbish all claims of the temple’s historical authenticity.</p>
<p>These scholars received a big jolt when the judgment of the Allahabad High Court in September 2010 not only accepted the contention—based on both archaeology and historical documents— that a temple predated the Babri Masjid on that site, but it cast aspersions on the claims of many ‘eminent’ historians to domain expertise. Indeed, once the depositions of many of the pro-Babri historians, including those with formidable reputations in institutions such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, became public, they suffered a serious loss of face. It is interesting that since 2010, historians have largely kept their silence.</p>
<p>The other consequence of the 2010 Allahabad judgment is that the secularist belief that the courts would inevitably rule against the temple has suffered a grievous setback. It would be fair to say that after the 2014 General Election and the 2017 Uttar Pradesh election, the quantum of opposition to a proposed temple has diminished quite substantially. While the belief that any new Rama temple on the disputed site in Ayodhya would be an outrage on India’s secularism still persists in intellectual circles, the political class as a whole seems less hostile. Indeed, there is now a grudging realisation that opposing the temple in the same way as pre-1992 would carry a great electoral risk. There is still a lingering hope that judicial procrastination would dissipate the energies of those anxious to see a temple built on the site, but there is also a simultaneous acknowledgment of the inevitability of a temple on the disputed site in Ayodhya.</p>
<p>The last word on the Ayodhya dispute has not yet been written. When the matter does get resolved, if it ever does, historians and scholars will attach considerable significance to the larger fallout of the demolition of the Babri shrine 25 years ago. Coinciding as it did with the death throes of the Nehruvian consensus and the initiation of a new direction for the economy, the Ayodhya movement had unintended but profound consequences. December 6th, 1992 was an inflexion point for modern India.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Hinduinflexion1.jpg?itok=9cfhRf4k" /><div>BY: Swapan Dasgupta</div><div>Node Id: 23700</div>Thu, 30 Nov 2017 18:26:46 +0000vijayopen23700 at http://www.openthemagazine.comEditor’s Note: Demolition-Reclamation-Reinventionhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/ayodhya-25-years-later/editor-s-note-demolition-reclamation-reinvention
<p>TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago on December 6th in Ayodhya, a crack on the dome of a mosque marked the most decisive rupture in the secular make-believe of Indian politics. There they were, playing out a script borrowed from history and mythology, seeking justice for the aggrieved Hindu, whose legion multiplied in resentment and revenge. On the domes were restoration artists with pickaxes, reclaiming their displaced god and shedding the last pretence that had shrouded their identity so far. It was a sight that India of the 20th century had seen only in history books, and it happened at a time when, elsewhere in the world, demolition was the repudiation of an ideological lie. The Berlin Wall had fallen; Eastern Europe was liberated; the Soviet empire had collapsed along with its last commissar who let it go. It was liberation time, though not the end of history. In India, the ruins of a mosque told a different story: identity sought legitimacy from a contested past.</p>
<p>The man who celebrated the ruins, the liberator covered in the dust of hate and faith, symbolised another demolition: the coming apart of the delicately assembled Nehruvian New Man, the poster child of Independent India exhibited in less fortunate parts of the ‘Third World’. The Nehruvian golem was a necessary experiment in genetic engineering to keep India intact. It was the responsibility of the state to protect the New Man from the corrosive influences of the ‘nation’ and ‘religion’. They were the twin evils of a modernity that could be attained only through the scientific application of socialism. The New Man was Dr Socialist’s obedient monster. He too was demolished in Ayodhya that day— whether for better or worse, India has not stopped arguing.</p>
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<p>Twenty-five years on, the India of Narendra Modi owes a great deal to the movement that culminated in Ayodhya on a day that was saddest for some, shameful for many, and satisfying for a few</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In retrospect, it was meta-demolition. The Hindu Rearmed was an inevitability to be reckoned with in an India on the brink of rejecting the cosy assumptions of what LK Advani had called ‘pseudo-secularism’. As the angry Hindu looked for his gods in the vandalised sites of shared memory, elsewhere in real time and space, fear took hold. In the assertive age of Indianness, defined by those who demanded civilisational rights over geography, the outsider was the one who demurred over uniformity. It was a time when nationalism, for its full realisation in a place where the sacred remains the most disputed, required a Hindu adjective. The political Hindu, still struggling with a greater sense of hurt, rejected the old order. Ayodhya set the stage for Hindutva in power.</p>
<p>And it must be said: one man worked the hardest, travelled the most treacherous alleys of Indian politics, to make Ayodhya a metaphor for reclamation and reinvention of the national self. Still, in his own words, the demolition, the cruel abruptness of it, saddened him. He was the charioteer, the original mobiliser, who dared to breach the barrier between history and mythology to retrieve the sacred nation from the swamps of ‘pseudo-secularism’. Thankful gods would join him in the electoral battle for India one day, but in the end, he would not be the one sitting on the throne. There would only be way stations in his journey—and Ayodhya was one of them—but no final destination. Still, the First Yatri of Indian politics never stopped walking, and he would even cross the border to visit another disputed site. His pilgrimage to the mausoleum of Jinnah was an extension of his argument with history; it was also his desperate bid to re-imagine himself. Abandoned and left alone to nurse his grievances, he still has one consolation: when India took a historic right turn, he held the semaphore from a chariot.</p>
<p>Twenty-five years on, the India of Narendra Modi owes a great deal to the movement that culminated in Ayodhya on a day that was saddest for some, shameful for many, and satisfying for a few. Today, Ayodhya is not an invocation that unites the base; India has come a long way from the ruins of a mosque that was not always a mosque. The inheritors of Ayodhya’s legacy want a suitable temple for Rama, but no leader in Modi’s India is likely to remobilise the faithful and the vengeful for the sake of the Perfect Man. In spite of the caricature by leftist fundamentalists, Modi is on a journey to achieve the status of the Perfect Ruler, and along the way, the last remains of entitlement are being demolished, without much fanfare. A temple in Modi’s India, if his words are any indication, cannot afford to be incompatible with the spirit of modernisation he has unleashed. India may have outlived the political uses of Ayodhya as a slogan, but Modi has many more temples of unity and progress to build on the ruins he inherited as Prime Minister.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Editor%27snote_4.jpg?itok=hyhg8Fa5" /><div>BY: S Prasannarajan</div><div>Node Id: 23699</div>Thu, 30 Nov 2017 18:16:46 +0000vijayopen23699 at http://www.openthemagazine.comMark Tully: The Witnesshttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/ayodhya-25-years-later/mark-tully-the-witness
<p>SIR MARK TULLY is as sprightly as ever. He had been unwell recently, but has recovered, exuding a warmth and happiness that is rather contagious. He settles down in his chair with the caveat that 25 years is a long time and he doesn’t remember everything. But as he begins to talk about what happened in Ayodhya on December 6th, 1992, it emerges that he hasn’t forgotten anything, not even the minute details, as a witness to the making of a moment that would alter Indian politics forever.</p>
<p>He doesn’t entirely agree with that statement , though, because he feels that “in India, things don’t happen that way”. Born in Calcutta in 1938 and raised in England as a teen, Tully has spent his best years in India chronicling its political milestones and capturing its myriad charms and endless contradictions. His books <em>India in Slow Motion</em> and <em>No Full Stops in India</em> are proof of his love for the country with all its quirks and uniquenesses.</p>
<p>Tully eschews conclusions of the kind that insist the Emergency or the demolition of the disputed structure in Ayodhya or the Godhra incident steered the course of Indian politics into a <em>cul-de-sac</em> or a particular direction. “In India, it is not like you drive along the road and take either the left or the right. After these three incidents, things went back to normal. Yes, they all had an impact. I think the Emergency has prevented anyone else doing that again. The temple issue had a stunning impact, but thereafter things went back to normal; it was true of Godhra too,” says Tully who doesn’t seem to agree with the typical academic discourse that uses a single event in confirmation of some hypothesis. At the same time, he doesn’t want to underestimate the importance of these historical events in Indian politics either.</p>
<p>Seated comfortably in the living room of his home in Delhi’s Nizamuddin West, with his Labrador making frequent appearances, the 79-year-old journalist says that the rise of the BJP has been part of a long build-up process. “We have to remember that after [the demolition], the BJP didn’t grow suddenly like that. Much of the growth of the party, particularly in the 1980s and the 1990s, was due to the weakness of the Congress, starting from Rajiv Gandhi’s time and later,” he says as his partner Gillian Wright, whom he calls Gilly, breezes past on her way to a meeting. Also an Indophile, Wright has translated several Indian books into English. She had been there with Tully in Ayodhya on the fateful December day of 1992. She is well-versed in Urdu and Hindi and co-wrote <em>India in Slow Motion</em>, a book in which they describe their experience of the day the Babri Masjid fell.</p>
<p>Tully was there at least a day before because he wanted to do some trouble-shooting. <em>BBC World</em> had aired footage of <em>kar sevaks </em>on the Babri Masjid in a brief documentary on the subject, resulting in rumours that the British national broadcaster was spreading falsehoods. Tully worked for <em>BBC Radio</em> at the time, and on his arrival in Ayodhya, he was told by several journalists that the Sangh’s saffron-clad volunteers and leaders were looking out for BBC journalists with the probable intention of either warning them off or taking them to task. Some journalists mistaken for BBC representatives had been threatened by kar sevaks.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The people of Ayodhya are fed up with the whole thing. They want a normal life</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That night, Tully looked for Advani to brief him about the antipathy towards the BBC, expecting that he would do something to clear the air. But he couldn’t find him. He did manage to meet and speak to an RSS leader who was then the editor of <em>Panchjanya</em>. The next morning, one of the first leaders he met with his grievance was RSS’s K Sudarshan, whom he met a little distance away from the Babri Masjid where crowds had begun to gather in vast numbers. Sudarshan, who would later become the RSS Sarsanghachalak, was unconcerned, says Tully. “He was not interested in it at all,” he adds.</p>
<p>Sudarshan was probably more interested in what he expected would happen. The 150,000-strong crowd that had been waiting close to the mosque for at least a week had been chanting loud slogans and was highly vocal about its intention to bring down the triple-domed structure claimed to have been built on the remains of a temple by a general of Mughal Emperor Babar.</p>
<p>Tully stayed where he would remain for a long while: atop a building that offered a clear view of the mosque. He wrote about that morning: ‘At what the police hoped would be a safe distance from the mosque, a vast crowd, perhaps 150,000 strong, some of whom had been camping near the mosque for ten days, roared encouragement to speakers who threatened they would pull down the building erected by the Mughal conquerors. Sitting on the VIP’s platform, the former Maharani of Gwalior (Vijaya Raje Scindia), wearing the white sari of a widow, clapped when the mosque was described as a ‘symbol of slavery, an insult to Hinduism’. Besides her, Lal Krishna Advani, the politician who had masterminded the Ayodhya campaign, was strangely silent and disapproving.’</p>
<p>Tully and other journalists there in Ayodhya were well aware of the air of suspicion and hostility towards scribes at the time. The day was clearly different from previous occasions when the VHP and others spearheading the Ram Janmabhoomi movement— to build a temple for Rama in the place where the Babri Masjid stood—had performed symbolic rituals in honour of the proposed temple. According to Tully, the BJP and other organisations had given a commitment to the Government and the courts that it would only be a symbolic start, a religious ceremony, and no damage would be done to the mosque. But everyone knew something was wrong. Leaders such as Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi were there along with others, with the probable exception of AB Vajpayee who had seemingly distanced himself from the Ayodhya agitation.</p>
<p>Tully watched some leaders asking the police to stay away and Sangh volunteers breaching police cordons with ease. Then they began to climb up the domes of the mosque and started hacking away at the mortar. Tully had written even earlier that the police had joined the intruding <em>kar sevaks </em>‘in beating up television journalists, smashing their cameras and trampling on their tape recorders’. He describes the scene in his book <em>India in Slow Motion</em>: ‘Above the raucous slogans and the bellowing of conch shells, we heard a leader of the BJP shout through a microphone, ‘Police, don’t interfere’. He needn’t have worried. The police had no intention of interfering. The last line of defence retreated from the mosque holding their wicker shields above their heads as protection from the stones raining down on them.’</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Tully had great difficulty returning to Ayodhya, and when he stepped down from his vehicle, he was stopped by angry crowds. One of them stated, “Yeh saala BBC-wala hai. Iss saale ne khabar di</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With policemen abandoning their posts, dust billowing up amid relentless stone-throwing and the domes crumbling as more and more Sangh volunteers began to clamber up the mosque, Tully left the scene to drive 10 km to Faizabad to call up his London office and file the story. When he looked back at the 16th century mosque, he saw a saffron flag hoisted on top of it. “That was the last we saw of what was known as the Babri Masjid,” he notes. He broke the story to the rest of the world at lunch-time, and soon returned.</p>
<p>Tully had great difficulty returning to Ayodhya, and when he stepped down from his vehicle near the spot where the mosque once stood, he was stopped by angry crowds. One of them stated, “<em>Yeh saala BBC-wala hai. Iss saale ne khabar di</em> (This is a BBC man. He is the one who reported)”</p>
<p>The group kept shouting, “Foreign journalists, CIA agents.” Tully remembers that some of them prodded him with tridents and were discussing what to do with him when a young <em>sadhu</em> restrained them from beating him up. He and a few local Hindi journalists who were picked up from the vicinity were taken immediately to a nearby temple where they were locked up in a room. “We spent one to two hours there and so I couldn’t see the last scenes of the fall of Babri Masjid,” recalls Tully.</p>
<p>After a while, his captors offered to free the Indian journalists, saying they had nothing against them, but berated him for allegedly giving out ‘wrong news’. But the local journalists refused to leave without him. The <em>kar sevaks </em>responded, “Okay then, you guys also stay here.” Finally, a local official turned up and warned the saffron-clad volunteers who had detained Tully along with other journalists that they would attract too much negative publicity if these people were beaten up or if something grievous happened to them. The <em>mahant</em> of a nearby temple offered help: he would shift them to his temple until some way was found to take them all to Faizabad closeby.</p>
<p>“We just sat there at the other temple,” says Tully. And then a big police lorry came to take the journalists to safety, away from the frenzied mob. “So we put saffron bands around our heads and drove out to Faizabad,” he says with a grin. They safely reached their hotels, but riots broke out in various parts of the country.</p>
<p>Tully now believes that for a peaceful resolution of the Ayodhya dispute, it is important that the concerns of Muslims also be addressed. He isn’t pleased about the prospect of a temple coming up in Ayodhya without any accommodation of Muslim sentiment. Though RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat has announced that only a temple would be built on the land where the Babri Masjid once stood, Tully is of the view that such acts of triumphalism would have a bad effect on the majority’s relations with the Muslim community, which makes up about 15 per cent of the country’s population. “I feel India is very lucky [that Muslims] have basically been a very peaceful community.... Every effort should be made to ensure that Muslims continue to feel at home in this country,” he says, emphasising that Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself is a votary of this proposition. “If he is true to his words, it is going to be good for communal relations.”</p>
<p>Tully believes that Modi will most likely pursue his goals of development and reforms rather than resort to the appeal of Hindutva, which was part of the General Election campaign that helped the BJP cruise to power in 2014 and perform well in several state elections held since then. “But the big thing was Modi himself [as a moderniser],” Tully says, suggesting that Modi will therefore be keen on meeting his economic promises.</p>
<p>“A united Hindu vote has its benefits, but I think far more important would be the BJP’s performance in governance,” he adds. Comparing the priorities of top BJP leaders, the senior journalist says, “Advani played a major role in building the party. He was the one who did the hard work, while [former Prime Minister] Vajpayee was the face of the party. Advani had a seminal role.”</p>
<p>He goes on, “Modi is a politician with great communication skills. He had a long apprenticeship as Gujarat Chief Minister before he became Prime Minister; Advani has always been a party man until he became Home Minister [and later deputy Prime Minister], but he was always number two. He doesn’t have the charisma that Modi has.”</p>
<p>After the fall of Babri Masjid, Tully, who is fluent in Hindi, returned to Ayodhya a few times and made a series of interesting observations about the Uttar Pradesh town. On one occasion, he visited Ayodhya during the Panch Kosi Parikrama, when pilgrims walk around the boundaries of the city they believe was the birthplace of Rama. By force of habit, he spoke to as many people as he could.</p>
<p>“The people of Ayodhya are fed up with the whole thing. They want a normal life,” he sums up.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Marktully1.jpg?itok=caerhW7v" /><div>BY: Ullekh NP</div><div>Node Id: 23688</div>Thu, 30 Nov 2017 10:17:31 +0000vijayopen23688 at http://www.openthemagazine.comKameshwar Chaupal: The First Kar Sevakhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/ayodhya-25-years-later/kameshwar-chaupal-the-first-kar-sevak
<p>IN 1993, AFTER THE Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party came together in Uttar Pradesh, a slogan floated to celebrate that alliance did not come as a surprise to the Sangh Parivar. A state where people had brought down a 16th century mosque in the name of Rama just a few months earlier was now reverberating with: ‘<em>Mile</em> Mulayam-Kanshi Ram, <em>Hawa mein ud gaye</em> Jai Shri Ram’ (Mulayam and Kanshi Ram join hands, ‘Jai Shri Ram’ vanishes in the air). The Hindu consolidation that the Sangh Parivar had hoped for in the wake of the Rama temple movement had hit an even bigger obstacle earlier, in 1990, when the then Prime Minister VP Singh implemented the Mandal Commission Report on reservations of Other Backward Classes. Suddenly, the Hindu votes the BJP was counting on were divided into Mandal and Kamandal, as it were.</p>
<p>One man watched these developments with dismay. Just a few months before the Mandal implementation, he had hoped to be remembered by history as a mascot of Hindu unity. Now he looked up in the sky, remembering Rama, praying for a miracle. The miracle would occur many years later, first in the 2014 General Election, and then in much bigger way, in the 2017 UP Assembly polls.</p>
<p>Kameshwar Chaupal, now 61, recounts the exact moment he was called onto the stage in Ayodhya with Sangh Parivar stalwarts and told that he would lay the first brick at the construction site of the proposed Rama temple. “It was such an emotional moment for me that I still get goosebumps when I recall it,” says Chaupal.</p>
<p>Chaupal was born in a remote village in Supaul district in Bihar’s Mithila region. In Hindu tradition, Mithila is home to Sita, Rama’s wife. “When we were growing up, we believed that Rama was our relative,” he says. In songs sung on marriages in his village, the groom and the bride would be referred to as Rama and Sita.</p>
<p>The village is on the banks of the River Kosi, the vagaries of which were a frequent cause of suffering for villagers like Chaupal who lived on its banks. There was no development. It was difficult living there, more so for a Dalit family like his. In the hope that he would make something of his life, Chaupal’s father sent him to a school on the western bank of the Kosi, on the border of Madhubani district. It is here that Chaupal came in contact with the Sangh. One of his teachers happened to be an RSS worker. “But in those days, one would keep it under wraps,” he says. The teacher was a physical education instructor who often incorporated RSS Shakha drills in his regimen. It was here that Chaupal finished his high school. With the help of his teacher, Chaupal then managed to secure admission to college. “The Sangh had a silent network,” he says, “My teacher just sent me to this college with a note for his friends there. He said the rest would be taken care of.”</p>
<p>By the time Chaupal completed his BA, he had become a Sangh full-timer. Afterwards, he was sent to Madhubani region as zila pracharak. It is here that Chaupal first heard of the Meenakshipuram incident far away in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. On February 19th, 1981, about 800 Dalits converted to Islam in Meenakshipuram village in Tamil Nadu’s Tirunelveli district, in protest of the discrimination faced by them at the hands of upper-caste Hindus. “If you really ask me, the seed of reclaiming Ayodhya germinated in that incident,” says Chaupal. In response to the mass conversion, the Sangh formed the Sanskriti Raksha Nidhi Yojana. In 1984, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) held a ‘<em>dharma sansad</em>’ at Vigyan Bhawan in Delhi, attended by hundreds of sadhus and Hindu leaders. One of the key speakers at the conference was Ashok Singhal, the VHP chief who invoked Rama’s name and said that Hinduism was under siege. Another speaker, Karan Singh, the son of Kashmir’s last Maharaja, spoke about the need to rid Hinduism of the evils of caste. Pointing at Ayodhya, Singh said it was a shameful matter for Hindus that they could not even light an oil lamp at Rama’s birthplace. It was at this religious council that a resolution was passed asking for disputed sites at Ayodhya, Mathura and Varanasi to be reclaimed by Hindus. It was also decided that public awareness for a Rama temple should be created through Shri Rama-Janaki rath yatras.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“During the freedom movement, two words from a sanyasi rebellion in Bengal brought the whole nation together. In contemporary politics, Rama will do that. That is our culture” - Kameshwar Chaupal</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The first of these commenced from Sitamarhi in September 1984, believed to be the birthplace of Sita. Chaupal was a part of this journey. “The response to that yatra surprised me,” he says. “Thousands of people joined us from small villages and towns.”</p>
<p>Less than two years later, on February 1st, 1986, the locks at the disputed site in Ayodhya were opened under Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress regime. In the second phase, plans for the construction of a Rama temple were formalised. Some in the Sangh, says Chaupal, were of the view that a few industrialists sympathetic to the Hindu cause could be asked to donate money for this project, but it was Ashok Singhal who rejected the idea. “Citing the example of Birla temple [built by industrialist Baldeo Das Birla] in Delhi, Ashokji said that every Hindu should feel that he or she has built it and not one businessman,” says Chaupal. So it was decided that every Hindu would contribute a rupee and 25 paise for the construction.</p>
<p>In November 1989 began the <em>shilanyas</em>, a ceremony to consecrate the foundation stone. Chaupal was in a tent in Ayodhya when one of Singhal’s close associates barged in and said that his name was being announced from the stage. When Chaupal rushed there, he saw all prominent leaders looking at him. It was then that he realised the significance of the occasion and his role in what was going on.</p>
<p>What the movement’s leaders wanted him to help achieve had its genesis in the Meenakshipuram incident: the assimilation of Dalits in the Hindu fold. And what bigger symbolism could there be than to have a Dalit lay the first brick at the <em>shilanyas</em>? Chaupal was chosen for this task.</p>
<p>FROM THAT 1989 moment in Ayodhya, Chaupal says, Hindu consolidation began to take shape. By the time the BJP leader LK Advani took out his rath yatra in 1990, the effects of the agenda had become palpable. Chaupal remembers Advani’s chariot reaching Patna, by which time the BJP had got a whiff of the leader’s imminent arrest. “In Gandhi Maidan, the late Pramod Mahajan took the mike and said Advaniji would be arrested,” recalls Chaupal. And that is what happened. In Samastipur, the yatra was stopped and Advani was arrested by Bihar’s Lalu Yadav government of the time.</p>
<p>The consolidation broke in 1990 after VP Singh offered OBCs reservations in government jobs and educational institutions. Suddenly, Hindus were no longer rallying unitedly behind the BJP. Many Dalits began to see “Rama <em>ki ladai</em>” as “<em>oonchi jaat ki ladai</em>”, says Chaupal, Rama’s fight as an upper-caste fight.</p>
<p>But despite these setbacks, Chaupal says, the Sangh Parivar managed to demolish the structure of the Babri mosque in December 1992. He was there when it happened. “I can tell you that no one could have stopped that tide. I don’t know what happened. There were walls that <em>kar sevaks</em> brought down with their bare shoulders. We would shout and say, ‘Run away, the wall will fall on you,’ but nobody listened. They were under some sort of spell,” he says.</p>
<p>Chaupal compares it to a war: “In a battle, only gods are invoked. We don’t say, ‘Gandhi<em>ji ki jai</em>, Nehru <em>ki jai’</em>. We say, ‘Jai Bhavani, Har Har Mahadev’.”</p>
<p>On the party’s directive, Chaupal fought the General Election of 1991 against Ram Vilas Paswan, but the upper-caste vote had shifted to the Congress because of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. In 2002, he became a member of Bihar’s legislative council. In 2014, he unsuccessfully contested an election from Supaul against Ranjeeta Ranjan, the wife of RJD’s Pappu Yadav.</p>
<p>Chaupal feels that the BJP could not do in Bihar what it did in UP because elections in Bihar turned into a backward-versus- forward battle. “In Bihar, there is a lot of work to be done on caste. It won’t be so easy,” he says. But as compared to his childhood days, he says, there is already a sea change within society, though it may not get replicated in politics. In villages now, in marriages and during <em>shraadh</em> ceremonies, there are no boundaries between upper and lower castes, he says. As a child, Chaupal was once fined because he dared to pray at a temple he was not supposed to enter. “I still cannot,” he smiles. “But there are changes. Personally, I feel I have been born thrice.”</p>
<p>Chaupal feels that Rama’s name would remain a major force in India, especially in electoral politics. “During the freedom movement, two words from a <em>sanyasi</em> rebellion in Bengal brought the whole nation together. In contemporary politics, Rama will do that. That is our culture,” he says, “If that culture dies, the country dies.”</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Karsevak1.jpg?itok=2SAmvH0s" /><div>BY: Rahul Pandita</div><div>Node Id: 23687</div>Thu, 30 Nov 2017 10:04:49 +0000vijayopen23687 at http://www.openthemagazine.comIn the Name of Ramahttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/ayodhya-25-years-later/in-the-name-of-rama
<p><strong>The Excavator: BB Lal</strong></p>
<p>IN the 1970s, when archaeologist BB Lal and his team started digging near the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, he had little idea of a mass movement brewing over a dispute that would come to redefine politics. “I was looking only at the antiquity of the Ramjanmabhoomi,” says Lal, referring to Lord Rama’s birthplace, at his Hauz Khas home in Delhi. At 96, he remembers the excavation work carried out from 1977 to 1986 quite distinctly. “The Babri Masjid was a small structure. Attached to [its] piers were 12 pillars with Hindu motifs and deities,” he says, “The excavated pillar bases along the boundary wall penetrated the complex, raising the question if these had a link with the pillars of the piers,” he says. About four decades later, Lal documented these details in a book, <em>Rama: His Historicity, Mandir and Setu</em>. After a talk he gave in 1991 at Vijayawada on his findings, scholars asked him if there was a temple under the mosque.</p>
<p><img alt="The Excavator: BB Lal" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="e0a806ca-0dac-4317-adc1-a06db9ee6649" src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/BBLal.jpg" />Lal says he answered as an archaeologist would—that unless the actual area of concern was excavated, no such conclusion could be drawn, adding that the mosque’s floor was wide enough to conduct spot probes without damaging the structure. By then, the Ramjanmabhoomi issue had turned into a full-fledged political movement, and when the Masjid was pulled down on December 6th, 1992, he says, “Personally, speaking I was unhappy about it.” To him, it was incidental that he was involved with the 1977-86 excavations. Ayodhya was one of five sites taken up for the Ramayana Project of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, of which Lal was appointed director after he quit as director general of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1972. As an academic, he says, he had three ‘curiosities’: uncovering archaeological remains of the Ramayana, Mahabharata and the Aryans. The findings of the Mahabharata Project, for which excavations were done in the early 1950s, had encouraged him to take up the historicity of the Ramayana. Lal had no political connections and was never in touch with any leader of the agitation for a temple in Ayodhya, though he always had his political views. “There is only one god in this country—the vote,” he says. His role in Rama’s ascent as a political icon may have been unwitting, but was significant all the same. “A story on Ayodhya would be incomplete without him,” says Ram Bahadur Rai, a former journalist who heads the board of the Indira Gandhi Centre for Arts, “His findings were cited as evidence in the agitation.”</p>
<p><strong>The Initiator: Ramchandra Das Paramhans</strong></p>
<p><img alt="The Initiator: Ramchandra Das Paramhans" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="6cb2fa80-7490-4ae7-b3f4-e7948d205d6a" src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Ramchandra.jpg" />Two years before Lal first began excavation work in 1952 on the Mahabharata Project, Ramachandra Das Paramhans, born as Chandreswar Tiwari in Bihar in 1913, had filed a law suit for prayers to continue and idols to be retained under the central dome of the Ayodhya structure. An earlier suit for the right to perform puja at the site had been filed in Faizabad by one Gopal Simla Visharad soon after an idol of Ram Lalla was found placed there overnight in 1949, but as head of the Digambar Akhara, a congregation of Naga sadhus based in Ayodhya, Paramhans was among the first to mobilise an effort to claim the disputed site’s legal title. “He was convinced of the historicity of the place and was adamant that Ramjanmabhoomi should be liberated. Till his last breath, he said he will fight for it,” recounts BJP leader R Balashankar, a former journalist and former editor of the RSS publication <em>Organiser</em>. With his flowing grey beard and yellow dhoti, Paramhans shot to fame as president of the Ramjanmabhoomi Nyas, an entity dedicated to the cause. In 1985, he even threatened to immolate himself if the gates of the shrine were not opened by Ram Navami the following year (neither happened). According to Balashankar, Paramhans had lost faith in the judiciary and believed that only a mass movement would deliver Hindus justice. He died in 2003, aged 90.</p>
<p><strong>The Pathfinder: Moropant Pingley</strong></p>
<p><img alt="The Pathfinder: Moropant Pingley" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="00809dee-9fe5-48d2-b85e-c02a6be7a8e0" src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/MoropantPingley.jpg" />Moropant Pingley, a senior RSS leader, worked for the cause behind the scenes. A full-time pracharak, he came up with several ideas to give the movement ballast. “I met Pingley several times. He joked a lot, but never divulged his plans,” says Ram Bahadur Rai, a former journalist. As a founding member of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Sangh affiliate that spearheaded the temple agitation in the 1980s, Pingley was the man who drew out the road map. He died a couple of months after Paramhans.</p>
<p><strong>Frontline Fighter: Ashok Singhal</strong></p>
<p><img alt="Frontline Fighter: Ashok Singhal" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="a0ba7201-da5f-494e-9327-e51eaaaf9316" src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Singhal.jpg" />As the man deputed in 1981 by the RSS to lead the VHP, Ashok Singhal was at the forefront the movement. He had caught the Sangh leadership’s attention that year with a speech at an RSS conclave in Bangalore asking for a Hindu awakening in the aftermath of the mass conversion of Dalits to Islam in Meenakshipuram, Tamil Nadu. Singhal was among the organisers of the first VHP ‘dharma sansad’ in 1984, attended by hundreds of sadhus and others, at Vigyan Bhavan in Delhi. He was among those present at the site during the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Balashankar recalls that when he met the VHP chief at an Agra guest house where he was under arrest after the event—along with such BJP leaders as Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti—Singhal had said the demolition had happened in the heat of the moment. “He told me it was not in the scheme of things to bring down the structure. At the same time, he said he was not unhappy about it,” recalls Balashankar. Singhal died in 2015.</p>
<p><strong>Priest with a Cause: Mahant Avaidyanath</strong></p>
<p><img alt="Priest with a Cause: Mahant Avaidyanath" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="210dfa56-d061-4ac8-867b-7b476eddaeea" src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/inline-images/Aviadyanath.jpg" />In 1984, Mahant Avaidyanath, the saffron-clad chief priest of the Gorakhnath temple and a Hindu Mahasabha leader, founded the Ramjanmabhoomi Mukti Yajna Samiti to ‘liberate’ the disputed site. This body planned processions with Hindu nationalist slogans to be chanted. “He was a strong orator with a powerful personality,” says Balashankar. Like Paramhans, Avaidyanath is among those listed by the Liberhan Commission report on the Babri Masjid demolition for having made ‘provocative speeches’. He joined electoral politics in 1962, winning UP’s Maniram Assembly seat, which he won four more times after that. Avaidyanath also won the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha seat four times—as a Hindu Mahasabha candidate in 1970 and 1989 and as a BJP leader in 1991 and 1996. Ten years before his death in 2014, he passed the mantle of the Gorakhnath temple on to his protégé Yogi Adityanath, who also represented Gorakhpur in Parliament several times and is now Chief Minister of UP.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Inthenameoframa.jpg?itok=t_MLlYfZ" /><div>BY: Amita Shah</div><div>Node Id: 23686</div>Thu, 30 Nov 2017 09:19:23 +0000vijayopen23686 at http://www.openthemagazine.comLK Advani: Man of the Movementhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/ayodhya-25-years-later/lk-advani-man-of-the-movement
<p>LAL KRISHNA ADVANI became BJP president in 1986, at a time when the party had only two seats in the Lok Sabha, and Congress Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, naïve and conceited with a brute majority in the House, had ridiculed the BJP lawmakers—AK Patel and Chendupatla Janga Reddy—using the famous Family Planning slogan of the period: ‘Hum Doh, Humaare Doh’ (We Two, Our Two). In the 1984 General Election, despite a wave of support for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in the wake of a series of riots in several parts of north India, BJP’s AB Vajpayee had adopted a soft Hindutva posture to secure a wider appeal for the party. This strategy backfired in the polls held after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in which her son Rajiv Gandhi led a campaign, as pointed out by Christophe Jaffrelot and others, crafted around the theme of national integration with a pro-Hindu bias. The RSS chief at the time, Madhukar Dattatraya Deoras, was an astute political mind who sensed an opportunity in a hardline Hindutva stance that had already won the RSS grassroots appeal. And Advani was destined to become the poster boy of this aggressive brand of politics, transforming the BJP—founded in 1980 as a successor to the earlier Bharatiya Jana Sangh—into a mass movement. He became the face of the Ayodhya agitation first started by the VHP to reclaim Hindu sites lost to ‘invaders’ over centuries past. Hindu pride became an irresistible slogan for the party following the poll drubbing. A political opportunity soon arose for Advani’s party when news of the Bofors arms scandal surfaced, putting the inexperienced Rajiv Gandhi on the backfoot. Advani and other senior leaders of the BJP, including Vajpayee, worked day and night to cobble an electoral understanding with the breakaway Congress group led by VP Singh, the Left parties and others. While Janata Dal, the new front launched by Singh and others, managed to form the second non-Congress national Government ever in Indian history, in 1989, the BJP and the Left parties offered it outside support. Advani’s strategy had clicked; the BJP had won 85 seats that year in the Lok Sabha under his watch, up from two in 1984. That Rajiv Gandhi launched his 1989 election campaign from Ayodhya was proof of the impact that Advani’s elevation as party chief would have on a man who had grossly underestimated the BJP.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Despite Advani’s contributions to the BJP, he was tagged as No 2, in Vajpayee’s shadow. This was because he chose not to challenge Vajpayee’s authority</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When VP Singh went ahead with the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report, a 1980 proposal to award 27 per cent reservation to Other Backward Classes in education and government jobs, the BJP resented it but waited for a chance to withdraw its external support. That came the day Advani, who had been leading a rath yatra on a chariot fashioned out of a truck from Somnath Temple in Gujarat to Ayodhya, was arrested in Samastipur, Bihar, on October 23rd, 1990, on the orders of Chief Minister Lalu Prasad, a close associate of VP Singh. After another short-lived Chandra Shekhar-led Government, the BJP faced a General Election in 1991, and despite a sympathy wave for the Congress following the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, Advani’s party secured 120 seats in the Lok Sabha. The BJP had arrived on the national scene, thanks to Advani’s hard work in turning a party of respectable parliamentarians into an electoral force to reckon with. In 1996, a BJP-led alliance won 161 seats, and in 1998, 182 seats, enough to form a government at the Centre. In 1999, the BJP-led NDA retained its tally of 1998, losing power in 2004 and returning only in 2014 with Narendra Modi’s ascent to the party’s top.</p>
<p>Until he incurred the wrath of the RSS in 2005 for having called Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah ‘secular’, Advani—a movie addict and cricket enthusiast—had had a great innings in politics. The RSS made him Leader of the Opposition in 1991 though Vajpayee, Advani’s senior, was also elected to the Lok Sabha that year. Advani thought it was inappropriate and dispatched KN Govindacharya to Nagpur to get then RSS chief Rajendra Singh to change his mind. Singh told Govindacharya, “You know the party is in this position because of the temple agitation.”</p>
<p>Despite his immense contributions, Advani has always been tagged as No 2, in the shadow of Vajpayee. That was also because he chose not to challenge Vajpayee’s authority, which he could easily have. In 1995, on November 12th, at a three-day plenary session of the national council of the BJP in Mumbai, he announced of his own volition that Vajpayee would lead the party in the 1996 General Election. The RSS, it is believed, had favoured Advani as its prime ministerial candidate, but, as luck would have it, he came under suspicion in a money-laundering case around that time. Despite the political setback, he would return to hold key positions in the Vajpayee Government (1998-2004), including the post of Deputy Prime Minister. He also nurtured younger leaders—including the one who would one day pip him to become the party’s prime ministerial candidate in 2014, Narendra Modi. At 90, the Karachi-born Advani, whose autobiography <em>My Country My Life</em> was a bestseller, is in his sunset years, having started off as an RSS pracharak in Rajasthan in the early 1940s and having spent some years in jail over his decades- long stint in politics. Yet, once called Iron Man II of Indian politics (the first being Sardar Patel), Advani’s contribution to mainstreaming Hindu right-wing politics perhaps eclipses that of any other. Love him or loathe him, his has been an extraordinary life.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Manofthemoment.jpg?itok=4H7TToOD" /><div>BY: Ullekh NP</div><div>Node Id: 23685</div>Thu, 30 Nov 2017 09:04:08 +0000vijayopen23685 at http://www.openthemagazine.comDateline Historyhttp://www.openthemagazine.com/article/ayodhya-25-years-later/dateline-history
<p>FOR A MAN at the threshold of his eighties, Nritya Gopal Das has a stentorian voice and a commanding presence. The leader of the Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas, an organisation spearheading the Rama temple movement, exudes confidence and fields questions from TV journalists with the ease of man who knows what he is saying. He should, for after the 2003 death of his senior, Ramchandra Paramhans, he has been among the topmost religious leaders who have kept the agitation going even in its quiescent phase.</p>
<p>One BJP Government completed a full term in 2004 and another is into its fourth year, and there is no sign of the temple being constructed so far. But this has not dampened Gopal Das’ spirits. “(Narendra) Modi and Yogi (Adityanath) are both in power. If the temple will be built, it will be built now, during their term in office, or it will never be,” he says, speaking in his meeting room tucked away in a bylane of Maniramdas Chhavani in Ayodhya. He is quick to add that he is confident the construction will be carried out.</p>
<p>This sentiment is a far cry from the heady days of the early 1990s. At that time, there was a groundswell in favour of the temple and activists poured in from across India, bearing bricks etched with ‘Shri Rama’ in a multitude of languages spoken in the country. When December 6th, 1992, came, the combination of activists and a prime minister who allegedly harboured ‘Hindu wishes’ proved irresistible. The mosque vanished, but 25 years later, the temple is yet to materialise.</p>
<p>The bricks can be seen in neat piles at the workshop of the Nyas barely a kilometre as the crow flies from the <em>janmabhoomi</em> site. Of the 212 pillars of sandstone needed for the ‘grand temple’, 106 are piled around haphazardly. Most bear shades of black after long exposure to the elements. There are just two craftsmen at the site who silently chip away at a blank pillar. “A lot depends on what happens in the court. If the remaining 106 pillars are to be carved fast, we need anywhere from 500 to 1,000 skilled artisans. Even then, the job may take anywhere up to five years,” says one craftsman. Hailing from Gujarat, he says the pace of the work is somnolent and the two supervisors assigned to watch over it have gone home for the time being. The architect has not visited the place in a long time.</p>
<p>All this offers a sharp contrast to the fevered debates in places like Delhi where speculation surfaces every now and then about a quickening pace of work at the temple’s <em>karyashala</em> in Ayodhya. The sleepy workshop is just a metaphor; it is as if the entire town is caught in a time warp. From the northern edges of the town, near the Swargdwar locality—from where Lord Rama is supposed to have left for heaven at the end of his earthly reign—to many buildings on its main thoroughfare, Ayodhya is a crumbling spectacle. In any case, no one remembers the significance of Swargdwar or other localities. There is a plenitude of temples, but history, it seems, has been abandoned. It is strange to hear hymns emanating from every street one passes and see muck all around at the same time. Except the environs of the temple’s proposed site, where there are some fine preserved buildings, little investment seems to have been made in Ayodhya. It is somewhat ironic that the most imposing structure in the town is a clock tower erected by the British in 1900.</p>
<p>The physical decay in what is no more than an overgrown 19th century village is matched by the quiet despair of its residents. Some chase tourists for work as guides; others long for a temple at the <em>janmabhoomi</em>, hoping for benediction at the hands of Lord Rama.</p>
<p>Close to the junction of the <em>janmabhoomi</em> compound’s exit and the road leading to Hanumangarhi, Keshavram Mishra runs an open kitchen for visitors. “There is no question about it. There was a temple in the past and another one will be built here. It is incumbent on us to rebuild it if this city is to gain the blessings of the Lord,” he says. For a cynical observer, his words can sound rather naïve, apparently ignorant of the issue’s complexities. What about Yogi Adityanath, can he do something about speeding up the process? “Yogi<em>ji </em>is a man with good intentions, but I doubt if he is up to the job. Yes, we have lot of faith in Prime Minister Modi, but what can a single man do in handling a country of 125 crore people?”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Narendra Modi and Yogi Adityanath are both in power. If the temple will be built, it will be built now, during their term in office, or it will never be” - Nritya Gopal Das, president, Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Perhaps all this is to belabour the point. After all, small town India leads an equally uncertain life, so why claim a difference for Ayodhya? The people of the city claim no such distinction for themselves. If anything, the operative emotion here is one of longing—for better work, opportunities, some development, and, of course, for the grand temple. The contrast with intellectual India could not be more stark. In the salons, universities, courts and seminar rooms of India’s big towns, the expression ‘Ayodhya’ evokes a different set of emotions that range from alarm to contempt, the latter mostly left unexpressed but one that is all too visible, given the tell-tale signs.</p>
<p>By the early 1990s when it became impossible to ignore the fervour for a Rama temple among Hindus, <em>ad hoc</em> theorising on the phenomenon began in earnest. This gained momentum after the 1992 demolition of the mosque. One of the earliest such theories was the anxiety thesis. It was a simple stitching together of events of the recent past, from the 1981 Meenakshipuram conversions to the 1986 legislative dilution of the Shah Bano judgment. As a first shot at theorising, anxiety did seem like a compelling argument for that time, even if extending a psychological explanation to the mass level raised more questions than answers.</p>
<p>AS IT OFTEN happens, the theories come after the event. Systematic analysis began well after the BJP’s first full term in office ended in 2004. There is now a clutch of closely linked theories that range from Hindu anxiety to comparative analysis of the Indian landscape, extending the roots of ‘Hindutva’ all the way to the colonial period. Most of this work has been penned by scholars outside India. Nearly two decades after Ashutosh Varshney sketched the idea of Hindu anxiety, Perry Anderson lifted it to the comparative realm when he clubbed India with Ireland and Israel in a bilious book. Three years later, in a calm work, Michael Walzer, a political theorist endowed with a far more sympathetic understanding of religion and politics, left Ireland out of the picture and added Algeria to the comparison mix.</p>
<p>The shifts in geographic gears notwithstanding, the two works display a certain similarity. If both scholars displayed anxiety at the recrudescence of religion in politics, their emphasis, tone and origin of what they sought to explain was very different. For Walzer, it was Nehru’s inability to tackle Hindu fundamentalism head on and failure to deal firmly with Islamic orthodoxy; in contrast, Anderson, a Marxist, declared India’s nationalist leadership— Nehru, Patel and Gandhi—as complicit in keeping India safe for Hinduism. The BJP merely took its rightful place in New Delhi once the core of the Congress had rotted away. For both, it was just a matter of time before a party appealing to the devout finally dispensed with the sham of keeping religion at bay. That was in the very marrow of this class of nationalisms.</p>
<p>Bile and regret, however useful they may be for storytelling, have their limits. For one, they cannot explain the swings in fortunes of mixing religion with politics in India. The comparative framework, too, has severe deficiencies.</p>
<p>There is, however, one work—not specifically devoted to India—that covers much greater ground and deepens our understanding of the role of religion in politics. In <em>God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics</em>—a work published a year before Anderson’s <em>The Indian Ideology</em> but largely ignored in India— three scholars, Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott and Timothy Samuel Shah, consider the problem from a different angle. Their perspective rests on ‘political theology’, the set of ideas that a religious community holds about political authority and justice, the lynchpin being the relation between religious and political authorities. Outcomes hinge upon whether a country’s religious authority is independent of the political one, or if the two are interdependent. In their words, this makes all the difference between some flying aeroplanes into buildings and others destroying dictatorial regimes. Within their typology of regimes, India lies on a plane where religious authority and politics are independent of each other even if there is a degree of consensus between the two. As compared with their ‘messy’ cases, India seems to occupy a calm position.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Of the 212 pillars of sandstone needed for the ‘grand temple’, 106 are piled around haphazardly. Most bear shades of black after long exposure to the elements. There are just two craftsmen at the site who silently chip away at a blank pillar</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At one level, this makes eminent sense. In India—specifically within Hinduism—there is no single religious authority, making the issue of interdependence of politics with religion more or less moot. This is where contemporary analyses of the danger of mixing politics and religion—a rage among Indian commentators and scholars alike—break down. It is not uncommon to hear, for example, the claim that India will become another Pakistan if ‘Hindutva’ continues to hold sway. This fear is usually expressed when some fringe group targets innocent Muslims. The elaboration, and extrapolation from Pakistan’s history where Hindus were targeted and driven out, is simplistically pasted on India. Anyone who points to the very different engagement of Hinduism with politics—about its core of tolerance and a history of peaceful co-existence with other religions—is sneered at. The explanation in <em>God’s Century</em> turns the Anderson/Walzer theses on their head. There is nothing unique or alarming about India’s ‘religious turn’: It is part of a global disenchantment with secular ideas that can be dated to the 1970s.</p>
<p>PERHAPS THIS IS the reason that what happened in Ayodhya in 1992 and fears of a temple being built at the site continues to cloud the judgement of many in India. Why a better understanding could not come about is, in part, due to the weakness of comparative study of religion in the Indian academy. Also at work is the bulwark of secular institutions—the combine of academia, the judiciary, the press and, in general, the educational system—that is unable to see any objective difference between Hinduism and other religions. That is understandable. At Independence, India was conceived as a religion-neutral entity even if over time the relative balance between different religions has gone awry, being largely dictated by concerns of forging electoral coalitions instead of the philosophical equidistance that the founders had in mind. But it is most visible at the intellectual level and what filters down of it to the level of popular commentary. If the Marxist sickle flailed impotently at religious ideas, much more serious blows were inflicted at the liberal anvil, turning all religions into a single indistinguishable blob. With a jaundiced perspective like this, liberal opinion can only view Ayodhya as a disaster at best and the harbinger of much worse to follow if Hindu opinion is not kept at bay. Practically, it is incapable of providing any solution to the issue. Political theology, as construed in <em>God’s Century</em>, is alien to this mode of thinking.</p>
<p>AGAINST THIS BACKGROUND, it is not hard to understand the behaviour of Nritya Gopal Das. His confident voice, at odds with words that he utters, and the despair over the political configuration needed to build the temple, are too obvious to be missed. So, too, is the message of Keshavram Mishra, the organiser of free meals: his sentences are tough, but the message is uncertain, wavering and tentative. That paradox—tough message and quivering thoughts—may well sum up the experience of Hinduism through the aeons.</p>
<p>One cannot find a better example of this state of siege than ground zero in Ayodhya, the <em>janmabhoomi</em> site. Located in the western part of the town, the site is in a state of lockdown at all times. Part of this is precautionary: there are judicial orders to maintain the <em>status quo</em>. It is the manner in which this has been done that defies comprehension. From the entry point to the exit is a walkway of roughly 1.5-2 km that snakes its way through the site. Across both sides are open access and control areas patrolled continuously by a mix of state police and armed paramilitary forces. If that were not enough, watchtowers with sandbagged sentries complete this quasi-militarised zone. Where once stood the three domes of the Babri Masjid now lies a mound covered by tarpaulin. Peering through the thick metal bars, one can see an idol of Lord Rama. Before one comprehends what’s going on, a priest—seated less than 50 metres from the idol—passes a handful of <em>prasad</em>. Wondering aloud about how the site is maintained when there are strict judicial instructions not to change anything yields an answer in unison from the priest and a policeman: “Sir there is no <em>vighna</em> (obstruction) in performing the daily <em>puja</em> here.”</p>
<p>Nothing prepares one for what can be seen at the site. There are sketch maps of the location that predate the events of December 6th, 1992, and pictures taken on that day with activists standing atop the domes. The actual site is now unrecognisable. Through the mass of metal and concrete, it is hard to figure even the relative positions of erstwhile landmarks such as the mosque, Sita’s Rasoi and Ram Chabootra. It will take a compass and a map and a good dose of fortitude to figure out the site’s geography.</p>
<p>All that, however, will be to no avail. It does not matter anymore as events have overtaken what stood on that hallowed ground once. Away from the site rage court battles, debates between intellectuals and assorted gurus looking for a solution. That, too, does not matter. The way things are on the ground in Ayodhya, it looks unlikely that a mosque will be allowed to come up without a major fight. The chances of a temple, too, remain uncertain. Ayodhya is a strange site to behold. Priests perform rituals with gun-toting policemen for company, somnolent craftsmen chip away at stone pillars, and a crumbling town sheds rubble regularly. It is a messy equilibrium that India is infamous for.</p>
<img src="http://www.openthemagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/public%3A/Datelinehistory1.jpg?itok=kCCHdIli" /><div>BY: Siddharth Singh</div><div>Node Id: 23684</div>Thu, 30 Nov 2017 08:45:07 +0000vijayopen23684 at http://www.openthemagazine.com